Here are 10 things you can do to exit the depression cycle and decide to be happy.

The Numbers Are Staggering.

In the United States alone, it estimated that 18.8 million people suffer from a depressive disorder in any given year.
That translates into nearly 10% of the US population. Worldwide, that number is estimated at more than 120 million.

According to the American Medical Association, more than twice as many women (estimated at 25% of the population)
experience depression as men (estimated at 12%), regardless of racial background or financial status. 

The US Commission on Mental Health concluded that 14% of the people living in the US will require treatment
for emotional disturbances at some point in their lifetimes.

A study by the World Health Organization entitled the “Global Burden of Disease” showed that major depression is
the leading cause of disability worldwide among people age 5 and older. It is the leading cause of disability in the USA for ages 15 to 44.

A survey by the Employee Assistance Professionals Association found that depression ranks as the third most prevalent
challenge in the workplace, following only family crisis and stress.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the estimated cost to employers in loss of productivity and absenteeism
from work is $51 billion per year, not counting the cost of treatment or prescription medications.

The Center for Mental Health Services estimates that 12% of school age children are maladjusted
showing signs of clinical depression and as many as 6% suffer from psychoses.

The American Society on Aging reported that there are three suicides for every two homicides.
Up to two-thirds of older adult suicides are attributed to misdiagnosed or untreated depression.

Suicide is the third leading cause of death among 15 to 24 year olds and the fourth leading cause of death
in 10 to 14 year olds according to the American Association of Suicidology.

People with depression are four times more likely to develop a heart attack than those
without a history of depression reports the National Institute of Mental Health.

Brown University Long Term Care study reports that about 6 million elderly suffer from depression but only 10% of them receive treatment.

Research shows that children of depressed mothers score lower on mathematical achievement tests.
Children between the ages of two and four with depressed mothers are
more likely to display delayed development. Chronic depression results from long-term
addiction to sadness. Allow me to explain…

As human beings, we all are wired to react emotionally to stressful situations
in one of three predominant ways…with anger, fear, or sadness.
This reactive nature likely began early in childhood for those who find
themselves chronically depressed…when someone said or did something
to “make” them sad. In that incidence, the person bought into something
negative or made something up about themselves, others, or
the world in general that “made them sad” and diminished their self-esteem.
From that point onward, they began the habit of accumulating
evidence to reinforce whatever they decided, attracting situations and
people that strengthened and compounded their addiction to sadness.

Much like a heroin addict addicted to that drug, the chronically depressed
person proceeds to scan for and find reason after reason to
become depressed. She or he actually becomes adept at buying into the
negativity of others or interpreting situations in such a way
that reinforces whatever it was that caused them to feel sad during
previous upsetting events. Depressed individuals even unwittingly
tend to attract people and circumstances that allow them to “get their fix” of sadness.

Those who develop this addiction to sadness often abdicate
responsibility for creating a different reality because of all of the
frequently invisible, contrary benefits they receive by being sad. These include…

*  They get to feel sorry for themselves.
*  They get to evoke the sympathy of others.
*  They get to be victims.
*  They get to avoid responsibility for turning their situations around.
*  They get to be right about how unfair things are.
*  They get to make others wrong about something.
*  They get to control others with their depression or avoid being dominated by them.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Chronic depression is a very real condition…
so real that brain chemistry becomes altered and if left untreated, can cause the depressed
person to spiral downward into a self-destructive, debilitating state.

The Antidote to Depression


If you find yourself succumbing to this addiction to sadness and worsening depression,
here are 10 things you can do to turn your situation around:
 

1. Take responsibility for doing whatever it takes to honor your most important core values.
   Your values are the threads that form the fabric of who you are at your core. If love,
   creativity, freedom, belonging, adventure, respect, security or other key values are being
   dishonored, identify what is needed to live in a manner that honors them.

2. Manage your negative thoughts. Create empowering interpretations for all daily events.
   Know that every challenging situation holds for you a gift for your personal growth
   and development.  Embrace life as a continual learning process and look for the wisdom that
   will come from every problematic situation and difficult person.

3. Adopt an attitude of gratitude as you go about your day. It’s impossible to be grateful
   and feel self-pity simultaneously. Look for the good in every situation.
   Make every day your personal Thanksgiving day!

4. Take on an empathetic point of view during all upsetting situations. Remind yourself
   that everyone operates in alignment with how they view the world and in an effort to
   protect themselves from hurt and harm. Ask yourself, “What must it be like in the other person’s
   world to have them say or do what they did?” Decide to find the behavior of other
   people as interesting rather than offensive.

5. Give up your right to take things personally. Don’t buy into the negative opinions or
   distorted perspectives of others when they don’t support your happiness.
   Counter anger with love and fear with understanding.

6. Decide to forgive those who hurt you. Know that every experience – and especially
   the traumatic ones – contains insights and gifts that contribute to your level of
   wisdom and empathy. Adopt the interpretation that you need the experiences to add
   to your spiritual growth so that you could use this acquired wisdom to contribute
   to the lives of others. By forgiving others, you complete with your past pain and
   open the door to being able to forgive yourself and move on to happier times.

7. Hire a coach to support you to embrace the process of personal development.
   Realize that every experience has prepared you to gain in your ability to contribute
   your gifts to others. Have the courage to decide to live from a newly invented
   declaration that represents the person you have decided to be rather than what
   the negative evidence of the past dictates. Fall in love with the learning process
   as you become a student of your own behavior and that of others.

8. Create a powerful and inspiring vision for your future. Write out your
   vision for your life in 1, 3, 5 and 10 years, describing in details what you
   will have, do and be known for as well as who you will contribute to.
   Describe in detail all 6 key areas of your life including your health and
   appearance, wealth and finances, job or business, relationships,
   personal and spiritual development, and how you will have fun, recreate
   and pursue your passions.  Take daily actions that support those goals that
   align with that compelling vision. 

9. Decide to have fun and live with passion. Hire a fun coach who can
   challenge you to add fun activities to your daily life.
   Explore new hobbies, interests, and develop new passions and friendships.
   Do at least 1 new fun activity every single day for yourself.

10. Take the focus off yourself and your own petty concerns. Find other
    people or worthwhile causes to contribute your time and energy.
    Decide to make everyone’s day a bit better than you found them.
    Volunteer at a homeless shelter, nursing home, or hospital.
    Give to others freely and watch what you’ll receive in return.

When you make the daily conscious decision to be happy moment by moment
and manage your addiction to sadness by shifting your thought
process the moment you feel the least bit blue, your world will
miraculously transform for the better.
 

To Your Best Life,
Joe

Dr. Joe Rubino

Please note: For those who may be unaware of my story, our commitment to others and the reason behind the personal development work we do, I have decided to share it below in all the emails we send out. If you are already familiar with this, please feel free to ignore it or forward it to someone you love.   To Your Best Life, Joe Rubino The Center for Personal Reinvention -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is Joe Rubino. Thank you for being a valued member of our online community. We at The Center for Personal Reinvention are committed to supporting you with a wide range of personal development, health and other gifts and programs to assist you in living your very best life. I have personally been involved in championing people to elevate their self-esteem, be happy, fulfilled, and empowered to believe in themselves and achieve their fullest potential since 1991. My vision is to impact the lives of 20 million adults and 20 million children to live their best lives by following the same  life-impacting principles that I, myself, followed to reinvent myself at the age of 35. Many have asked me to share my story with you in the hope that it may inspire you to realize that if I was able to embrace personal development and change my own life which was far from rewarding as you will soon lean, then you can as well. So, please allow me to share a bit about my story with this intention… My earliest memory of an upsetting event happened at the age of 5 when I was playing at the house of a teen-aged neighbor. My parents trusted this group of teen-agers who had a long history of playing football with us little kids. Well, on this particular day, perhaps, they forgot their football at home so they decided to use me as their football. One kid tossed me to another who tossed me to another who dropped me. I hit my head on a rock and went home crying at the age of 5 with a big egg on my head and likely a concussion. As a result of this episode, I decided that I was small, insignificant, and too weak to defend myself. I further made up that there was something significantly defective about me that would cause a group of much older kids that I admired and looked up to, to want to treat me with such rough disrespect. I further interpreted that these teenagers and people in general were careless, heartless, mean and cruel. And this is when I decided that the world was a dangerous place and that if I were to survive in such a place, I would need to find a strategy to protect myself from further harm. The survival formula that I created involved avoiding people whenever possible. I became an extremely introverted kid, having few friends and avoiding most events and interactions with others. For example, if I was walking down the street on my way home from school and I saw someone I knew approaching, I’d put my head down, make off I did not see them and cross the street. As you can guess, I soon worsened my situation and became know as a big snob and a target for bullies. The greater the number of bad experiences I encountered, the more my self-talk reinforced the need to hide and protect myself. And, of course, the worse my experiences became. This vicious cycle continued throughout my high-school and college years. My addictive background emotional mood or reactive state was “indignant anger.” I unconsciously looked for reasons to be angry with the mantra that guided my life being “How dare you!” It took very little to tick me off. If someone might cut in front of me while driving, I would react with anger and indignation – swearing at them and gesturing to them to show my upset. If I smelled smoke in a restaurant or public place, it would likewise tick me off and I would react thinking “How dare they! Don’t they know that second hand smoke kills!” In short, I was a walking upset waiting to happen. While living in this perpetual state of anger and indignation allowed me to justify my bad behavior, dominate others and avoid being controlled by them, it cost me my happiness, my personal effectiveness with people, destroyed many relationships and diminished the quality of my life. While contemplating which path to take regarding my career, I decided to pursue a career in dentistry. I unconsciously choose a profession where people would be unable to talk back to me and I could dominate them. Now, there is nothing wrong with being a dentist – it is an honorable and noble profession. But I had chosen it unconsciously for the wrong reasons. Again, I was unaware of the many ways that I sought both consciously and unconsciously to protect myself from getting hurt. So, at the age of 35, I had been in practice for 11 years. Although I was successful by many of society’s standards – I owned two large practices that employed 7 full time doctors and 8 additional employees, made a significant income, had the respect of my piers and patients, I intuitively felt that I was playing small but like the proverbial frog who sits in a pan on the stove and fails to jump out of the pot as the heat under it is slowly increased, my life was mired in deep resignation. I incorrectly assumed that I was who I was and there was little I could do about my unhappiness and disappointments in life. Well, there are no accidents as I was soon to learn. The Universe presents us all with unending opportunities for growth and expansion. We always have the choice of seizing any of these opportunities or we can maintain the status quo and continue along our familiar paths of convenience, protection, and resignation… or we can decide to risk boldly and take a new path that better honors our values and supports our inherent greatness.   When I was 35 years old, my dental business partner who was also an extreme introvert like me, was invited to attend a personal development weekend seminar.  Although neither of us felt comfortable attending an event that was way outside our comfort zones, we both took comfort in going with someone else. So reluctantly we booked a spot at the course, knowing that we sorely needed to break free from the many limitations and negative self-talk that had ruled our lives. To make a long story shorter, that 4-day course changed my life! I learned that my life was being run by decisions made by a 5-year-old and that I possessed the ability to break out of the self-imposed prison that I had created for myself. I discovered that I could identify my life purpose and step into that purpose while developing the many gifts that lay dormant inside me. I learned that I had the power to transform into a person that I could be proud of by taking my focus off of the many petty concerns that had run my life to this day and focus instead on something that would make life an exciting adventure by committing to devote my life to contributing to others! By the end of the seminar, I decided to take the plunge and enroll in a 1-year rigorous program that involved being coached for 30 minutes daily, 5 days each week for a year and attending four 4-day intensives over that time span. During that year, not only did I learn the principles that would transform my life in every area but I decided that to fully honor my core values, to fully develop and share my gifts with others and to live my best life would require that I totally reinvent myself… So I committed to another 10 years of immersing myself into personal development. That 10-year commitment would soon be replaced with a lifelong commitment to learning daily the distinctions that would empower my own life and allow me to best serve others. With this commitment to playing what I now recognize as “The Master Game” of impacting the lives of others by transferring “the power to succeed” I founded The Center for Personal Reinvention and began the process of creating structures to champion people to live their very best lives. Over the course of the past three decades, I have created courses in self-esteem elevation for adults and children, life-optimization coaching and advanced life-optimization coaching, relationship coaching, self-confidence coaching, business coaching and abundance coaching – all with the intention to support anyone willing to see life differently by accessing the areas of what they don’t know that they don’t know, and learn the tools that have the awesome power to transform lives. Although I have personally paid tens of thousands of dollars to learn and develop these principles, my commitment has always been to make them ultra-affordable so that anyone willing to move their lives forward would have the knowledge of exactly how to do so. As part of this commitment to champion people to be their best, we are now in the process of turning the three personal development fables that I wrote (The Magic Lantern, The Legend of the Light-Bearers and The Seven Blessings) into feature films that will share love, self-esteem and empowerment with the world thereby changing the state of our world which I fear is filled with hatred, violence, scarcity thinking, and despair. As I approach my seventh decade on this planet, I decided to include my story in every email that I send out in hopes of inspiring like-minded people interested in either transforming their own lives or in sharing my vision of impacting the lives of at least 20 million adults and 20 million children with others. It is only with your support that I will have the ability to impact the lives of this many people by sharing the principles that champion people to believe in themselves. The future of our world can indeed be marked by the soaring self-esteem principles that spread love to others, help them realize that scarcity is an illusion, and that the more we do to contribute to others, the more we will receive in return. Thank you for allowing me to share my story with you. I wish you peace, love, happiness and every blessing! Joe Rubino CenterForPersonalReinvention.com